"NeXT Computer (the original 68030 cube) was a high end workstation that was manufactured between 1988 - 1990. Back then it was a very expensive machine as a complete system would start at $6500 (in 1988 dollars). The machine is a 1 foot cube magnesium case that houses the computer. At the time, its performance was impressive, with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, a dedicated floating point CPU, and a digital signal processor built into the system. NeXT cubes featured a magneto-optical drive that stored a whopping 256 Megabytes (by comparison, high end Mac systems at the time might have featured a 20 Megabyte hard drive.) In its day, this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems!" No new information for the average OSNews reader, but lots of beautiful photos for a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

"One's choice of desktop environments on Linux and FreeBSD are not limited in the same way as with Microsoft.

I fail to see the difference with offerings from any other commercial vendor since the dawn of computing. "

Well, take Microsoft itself in its early days. On early versions of Windows, the graphical shell could be replaced and some OEMs shipped Windows with a very desktop environment. Back in the days of Win 3.1, Compaq used to ship their high-end multimedia-oriented PCs with Xerox's TabWorks as the default shell rather than progman.exe. I think they even did this for a while on Win 95. Microsoft ultimately changed the OEM license to stop PCs from being shipped with anything other than the standard GUI.